Necromancer's Gift

Overview

• Art update
• Community update
• Game update

Art Update

The second round of naming contests has finished successfully. Here’s a preview of all the creatures that got a name:

As usual, you can check their names in the bestiary.

Marlon, our only moderator for now, also updated the google doc he shared with a summary of the winners and the names of all the creatures in the game. You can also download the PDF version if that’s more convenient for you too.

Evolutions

One of the stretch goals of the Kickstarter was simply named “More Animations”. Well, here is part of what I had in mind when I wrote it: evolution animations for all the starters!

The animation for the fire starter is obviously missing, but I hope you like them. There is a poem associated with each starter, and I think that the end result will look great. I’ll also keep the last stage evolutions secret for now, but I do want to confirm that they exist.

Community Update

Necrobot has been updated. Here’s a quick overview of the most important changes:

• small bug fixes that probably only I noticed
• added a Shop Event where you can buy a small variety of items

• added the $bag command, which lets you equip items to your creatures

ps: Look forward to the new creatures appearing in Trivia Events soon 👀. There are no big features coming soon for the bot, but battles are still planned to be added before the end of the year.

Game Update

I finally had time to make a mac release for the game and add automatic scripts to help publish it. There is also an exit button, which was missing from the PC release too.

Necromancer’s Gift running on my 2019 Macbook Pro

Balancing

As I added the second batch of creatures to the game, and just before I started adding more moves, I realized that I was going too blindly into it. Thus, I spent some of my time building a tool to help me visualize the changes that I was making.

Keep in mind that this will probably not make it to the final game, as it is an internal tool, but it may be possible to adapt it to make light ‘mods’ for the game. Anyways, here it is:

Here’s a rough explanation of what it does: it runs a simulation with the default AI in a 1v1 battle against all other creatures until 1 dies. For each creature, it reports how much %hp is left, and how many turns it took to end the battle.

Here’s the same creature now with sleep added as a second move:

As you see, and as most people can attest from the prototype, sleep is OP, and so is depthmaw. Now, this is a simulation with a specific level in mind (at level 50). But we can certainly do better and show a graph for all levels instead:

And just one more time so that you can see it in action:

It may not look like much to you, but to me this brings a lot of information that was previously very obscure and some data to validate what many players had already reported. Mind you, I don’t intend on using it to achieve a perfect moveset balance, but I will use it to find outliers.

In the same light, I added a couple of charts to show other information, like base stats, affinities, and roles (which are rough loosely-defined archetypes for each creature and deserve their own blog post).

I’ll try to write a more in-depth blog post on each of these, but if you are curious about affinities, you can take a look at this post